The Cork Midsummer Festival, music from the Med and the Balkans, and Gregorian chants on today's list.
The Art of Swimming, Mimic, Meat
Cork Midsummer Festival
In its first week under new director William Galinsky, the Cork Midsummer Festival has drawn convincingly from local resources, as in these three home-grown productions whose very different themes nonetheless indicate significant hope for the future of theatre in Ireland. Such a portentous claim gives no idea of the almost joyous freedom of approach used by the playwrights concerned, although the prominent involvement in two of them of Tom Creed, associate director of Rough Magic and co-founder and artistic director of Playgroup, should hint at a slightly anarchic zeal.
At the Half Moon Theatre, anarchy might not seem appropriate to The Art of Swimming, written and performed by Lynda Radley, yet her direct communication first with her audience, then with her subject and then again with herself, has something of the courage of the reformer. The appeal of this reflection on the first British woman to swim the English Channel (Mercedes Gleitze was a British citizen of German parentage) is its simplicity. Radley relies on few props - it is hard, for example, to imagine a picnic basket being put to more creative use - and, without ever raising her voice, she conveys seas and harbours, lakes and straits from Wellington to Aran (where a decade of the Rosary was said by swimmer and support-crew on the crawl between the islands). She does not pretend to any special insights, she is simply supposing on the basis of the biographical facts and details gleaned from newspaper reports of the day, which are often redacted with a mischievous intonation. But there is a sense of identification, empathy, as well as curiosity which, with the assistance of composer and musician Michael John McCarthy, carries this skilful piece to success.
As with The Art of Swimming, Tom Creed is also director and lighting designer for Mimic, at the Cork Arts Theatre, which is written, composed and performed by Raymond Scannell - composed because this work is played upon a grand piano as black as the comedy it accompanies and punctuates. The script proposes an Ireland of the future, a fantasy which sometimes isn't all that far removed from present realities, a place in which a life expectancy of 210 years exacerbates family tensions and encourages suicide (with bodies dropping like raindrops) as a solution to unfulfilled demands on the social services.
The narrator - a low-pitched, unexcited Scannell - is on the psychiatrist's piano-stool as he re-lives the episodes of a half-understood existence; the references range from the Dandy annual, which becomes the stuff of nightmares, to our own vast catalogue of voices accumulated from politics to playlists, all with staying power and many of which Scannell imitates. Even though the commentary is internalised, the pointed, funny writing is engaging, and while Scannell on stage rather than on the page is a mild creation, flat rather than sharp, his ownership of this territory cannot be questioned.
Neil O'Sullivan's Meatat the Granary is so packed with references to the abattoirs of Victorian melodrama that one has to question his use of the names Ruskin and Coleridge for his characters. This, however, is a question without an answer and fades into insignificance under the impact of sex, murder, necrophilia, incest, insanity, drugs, corruption (both moral and physical), and grotesquerie of several kinds. Underneath all these gory trimmings lies a plot as coherent as the neatly functional set by Olan Wrynn and Medb Lambert, and as unlikely as the set is familiar, in a kind of Fanny by Gaslight way. The constable is in love with the prostitute who marries the doctor; a lamp post, a chaise longue with a very important bolster, a trapdoor and a winding staircase (Scott Duggan assisted in the set construction) are what might be called the other characters, having as lively and important a presence under Donal Gallagher's gleeful direction as any props might desire. Too well controlled to be merely a romping parody, the play's exaggerations are managed convincingly by the small cast, while Cormac O'Connor's sound and Lisa Zagone's costumes complete the evocation of Grand Guignol.
Cork Midsummer Festival continues until Sat
Mary Leland
John O'Keeffe (organ), Maynooth Schola Gregoriana
St Michael's, Dún Laoghaire
Gregorian chant might have been ousted by the vernacular liturgies of Vatican II, but as a medium of secular, new-age spirituality, it now reaches a wider audience than ever.
Since 2001, Schola Gregoriana has provided students of both sexes from St Patrick's College and NUI Maynooth with the opportunity of exploring music that was once the preserve of clergy and religious.
Consisting of chants proper to the day (the nativity of St John the Baptist), this was the Schola's first off-campus performance, and it had been assiduously prepared.
Under the astute direction of postgraduate student Giovanna Feeley, the men's voices paced through the antiphons and verses for first vespers at a bona fide monastic trot.
The more discursive melodies of the vigil mass were imperturbably sung by five women's voices, generating a powerfully atmospheric, almost Middle-Eastern aura, with their concentrated intonation and sean-nós-like agility.
If the Litany of the Saints, reeled off by full choir, was perhaps unduly ritualistic for a concert setting, it nonetheless resonated with three strategically themed organ solos, played with much taste by John O'Keeffe (who also improvised a placid and concisely resourceful introduction to each chant).
With seamless registration, a silky legato, and a subliminal flexibility that recalled the speech-rhythms of their source materials, Dupré's Cortège et litanie, Langlais's Incantation pour un jour saint and Alain's Litanies were polished, spacious and commanding.
Andrew Johnstone
Yurodny/Myriada
Meeting House Square, Dublin
Although the June weather tried to dampen the audience's enthusiasm for the combination of Nick Roth's Yurodny and the Cretan group Myriada, it was, by Irish standards, a half-hearted attempt and the music emerged triumphant.
And that, in itself, is tribute to the work both groups have done since the Cretan quartet arrived here.
Yurodny are a Dublin-based octet with the unusual instrumentation of two violins, cello, alto/soprano saxophone, trombone, accordion/percussion, bass and drums, while Myriada feature voice, percussion and two stringed instruments, with a double on wood flute. To bring two such groups together to tackle a programme of music from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans and to make them sound like a real band is a considerable achievement.
Apart from an attractive and idiomatically persuasive original composition, Zomorud by Myriada's lyra player, Paul Goodman, all of the music was traditional material, mostly dances, from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, Serbia, Thrace and Greece, as well as a classical Arab piece from Egypt, Lamma Bada. The pieces were distinguished not so much by any great interest in harmonic movement as by their unusual lines and, above all, their rhythmic complexity.
This was tackled and carried off with considerable gusto by the combined groups, although it was unsurprising, given the nature of the programme, that much of the rhythmic drive came from Myriada. The difference was apparent in each group's features, Myriada's Thracian suite of three regional dances and Yurodny's Stamboliiska Ruchenitsa, a dance by the great Bulgarian clarinetist, Ivo Papasov.
It would be ungenerous to make too much of this, because the feeling projected by the combined bands, if occasionally rough, was vibrant and irresistible. Particularly striking was the sheer verve of the contrapuntal playing on Gankino Horo, a Bulgarian line dance, and the zestful Andikrystos, another dance, from Asia Minor.
Among individual performances to catch the ear, singer Maria Koti and Paul Goodman from Myriada stood out, while Nick Roth's occasional solos, especially on soprano, seemed organic to the idiom. Likewise, from Yurodny, the solo work of violinist Oleg Ponomarev and trombonist Colm O'Hara stood out, while Francesco Turrisi gave evidence of his considerable talent on accordion, with a solo spot on the Serbian suite. But these belong to what is essentially an ensemble idiom, and as an ensemble performance the results were hugely enjoyable.
Ray Comiskey
